I was driving home from town today and saw this blimp over the horizon. The bad thing was that my camera and long lens were at home. The good thing is that blimps aren’t too fast. Anyway, I took a few shots for no particular reason. Blimp photos from the ground tend to be unspectacular unless you’re close with just the right background which I wasn’t and it wasn’t. The best photos I ever made were of the Goodyear blimp back in the early 70’s when I was able to photograph it up close while it was coming in for a landing. I wonder what ever became of those negatives. Anyway, I’ll have to check out local sports events in the next few days to see who is using the Direct TV blimp for aerial shots.

So I’m watching the jet fly by the moon and figured, ‘what the heck’ I’ll take a picture. Nothing spectacular, but it was one of those interesting moments. My biggest decision was whether or not to put the accent on the end of ‘cliche’ but I decided against it because some browsers would probably substitute some sort of funky symbol which would be worse than just leaving it off.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range which is a technique used to capture information in an image ranging from very dark to very bright and present it in a normal way. Usually, if you expose to get detail in the dark shadow areas, the bright highlights will be overexposed and will be white areas without details. In the same way, if you expose so that there is detail in the highlights, the shadow areas will be pure black. Someday, technology may provide us with sensors that capture the entire range, but for now we have to ‘cheat’ by making several exposures ranging from dark to light and then use software to combine the exposures to get the whole range.

Early versions of HDR software tended to produce a ‘look’ that can be quite impressive and interesting, but I always wanted to produce images that were a bit more natural. This image is from the 2011 Will County Fair in Peotone and I published another version from the series on August 27th of 2011 using more of the HDR ‘look’. (Check it out here) Each version has its own merits but I tend to prefer this technique.

(Side Note – I moved to Peotone when I was in the fourth grade and have attended the fair for decades [and decades] but never entered anything. So this year, I broke down and entered a few photos. This one ended up winning best of show in its division. I guess I can stop entering now, ’cause I can only go downhill from here.)

HDR (high dynamic range) techniques in digital imaging often make exaggerated dark looking clouds that are nearly black in spots. The other evening, I saw these clouds coming and they were almost black all by themselves without help from me and with the nearly setting sun providing some really bright areas breaking through. Saved me a lot of time in post processing.

It’s hard for someone my age who remembers the great amount of patriotism that followed the 9-11 attacks in New York and Washington, to realize that most of the kids in school have little or no remembrance of the event itself and that we have settled back into a mindset that preceded it. Some people may welcome this and others decry it, but it is what it is. Anyway, I made this image in downtown Chicago a few years ago while there was still some national pride.

An image of the Buddha Pavilion at Allerton Park by Monticello, Illinois. This is along the path that gets you to see the Fu Dogs. There are two Siamese Buddha statues (one shown here) and a Harihara statue in the Pavilion. The iron work on top is from a building originally in New Orleans. I usually just trek on to the Fu Dogs which are some of my favorite things in the park, but it’s hard not to stop and make a quick image of the pavilion.

I was watching a presentation of portfolio reviews the other day and the presenters recommended (almost insisted) that you shouldn’t include images of dead trees among other things. Oh well, here’s some dead trees.

Another exhibit of my fondness for corners. It’s not the corner so much, but the way the various lines and angles interact with each other and with the textures. And, as usual, it has an almost monochromatic look that I like.